Selection Primer , Working Foundations in photoshop

Working Foundations


it allows you to click the image multiple times. With each
click, you tell Photoshop which colors you want it to find. A
low Fuzziness setting with many clicks usually produces the
best results.
The selections you get from the Color Range command are
not ordinary selections, in that they usually contain areas
that are not completely selected. For instance, if you’re try-
ing to select red areas in an image that also contains flesh
tones, the fleshy areas most likely will become partially
selected. If you then adjust the image, the red will be com-
pletely adjusted, and the flesh tones will shift a little bit.
If a selection is already present when you choose Select >
Color Range, the command analyzes the colors only within
the selected area. This feature lets you run the command
multiple times to isolate smaller and smaller areas. If you
want to add the Color Range command to the current
selection, be sure to hold down the Shift key when choos-
ing Select > Color Range.
You can also turn on the Localized Color Clusters option,
which allows you to set a range for the area (color) sam-
pled, rather than for all the color within the image.

Refine Edge
Beginning with CS3, Photoshop offers a much improved
way of adjusting the edge of a selection. After making a

selection using any of Photoshop’s selection tools (or a
combination of selection tools), choose Select > Refine
Edge to bring up the dialog shown in Figure 2.58.

Figure 2.58 The Refine Edge dialog
offers several tools for refining your
selections.

The Refine Edge dialog lets you interactively preview
a selection on a number of different backgrounds and
provides some important controls that soften, resize, and
improve the edges of the selection.
When you first open the Refine Edge dialog, your selec-
tion is shown against a white background, allowing you to
see the quality of the edge. If you prefer, you can click the
display buttons at the bottom of the dialog, changing the
view to see your selection composited on different types of
backgrounds or displayed as a regular selection of “march-
ing ants”

Modify
The features in the Modify menu (Select > Modify) have
helped artists out of many sticky situations. At first glance,
it might not be obvious why you would ever use these com-
mands, but they’ll be very handy as you continue through
the book. The following list describes the commands:
 Border: Selects a border of pixels centered on the cur-
rent selection. If you use a setting of 10, the selection
will be 5 pixels inside the selection and 5 pixels outside
the selection. You can use this command to remove
pesky halos that appear when you copy an object from
a light background and paste it onto a darker back-
ground (Figures 2.60 and 2.61).
 Smooth: Attempts to round off any sharp corners in
a selection (Figure 2.62). This trick can be especially
useful when you want to create a rounded-corner
rectangle.